Fireside
by madamequeso
Summary: Post mid season finale, enchanted forest. Hook and Belle finally talk, and no one gets shot or hit with a book case. Implied Rumbelle and Captain Swan even though Emma and Rumple aren't there.


"I suppose you're happy." Hook jumped at the soft voice. He had thought he was alone, staring into the fire as the others slept, huddled together on the forest floor, but he looked up to meet a pair of lovely blue eyes, full of hurt and flames of their own. Was he happy? His first thought was of Emma, and that of course he wasn't happy, living in a world that didn't have her in it. Belle, always so perceptive, must have seen his confusion, because she clarified. "Now that Rumple's dead, I mean. That's what you always wanted, right?" The poor thing was trying very hard to be flippant, but her voice still shook on the word dead.

"No love, I can't say that I am, now that you ask." The endearment had slipped out, not as a casual flirtation, because even he knew that there was a time and a place and this grieving woman was not it, but as a result of some deep seated, misguided urge to comfort her, the same part of him that couldn't stand to see a woman cry. But he could see instantly that it was a mistake. Her shoulders curled in defensively and she said

"Don't. I am _not _your love." Then, so quietly he wasn't sure he was meant to hear. "I'm not anyone's, anymore." And there it was, the reason the dark one's demise wasn't nearly as satisfying as he had hoped. In all the years Hook had plotted, obsessed over killing him, he had never imagined leaving behind a broken heart, making someone feel the way he had after Milah's death. And it didn't matter that in the end Rumplestiltskin had died by his own hand, not Killian's. It still felt wrong to take much joy in it, with Belle and even Bae holding themselves together with the thinnest of threads. It would have been easier, if Belle was less obviously good. But even through her grief she was kind to almost everyone in their strange assembly, the only exceptions being himself and Regina, who she ignored if at all possible. He knew that they both deserved so much worse from her. It was hard, not to admire strength like that.

"I am sorry." He met her skeptical gaze for a brief moment. "Really, I mean it. I would not wish the pain of losing one's true love on anyone."

"You wished it on Rumple, when you shot me." She pointed it out calmly, as though she was discussing the weather.

"Anyone who had not already inflicted that pain on me." He amended.

"You truly loved her then? Rumplestiltskin's wife. Bae's mother." And that was what Killian would never understand. How a man could promise his life and his protection to a woman, make love to her, raise their child together, then crush out her existence with one hand. And it still bothered him sometimes, that the crocodile still bore the title of husband as he murdered Milah, while Killian, the man who held her while she died, was only ever an adulterer. But marriage hadn't seemed important on board the Jolly Roger, with the sea air whipping around them tasting of adventure, and a certainty in each other's eyes that they would always be everything the other needed.

"Yes, I truly did." There hadn't been any curse to test true love's kiss, but Killian knew what they had had been real, just as he knew that the sun rose in the east and that he would love Emma Swan for longer than his life was likely to last. There was silence for a long while, but finally Belle asked

"What was she like? Rumple would never tell me anything, but I tried to imagine her so many times." Hook sighed.

"She was…beautiful, of course. Brave. Stubborn to a fault, and she could have a fiery temper when she chose. Sad, when I met her, but happier after. She told me exactly where I could shove my sword, when I first tried to seduce her as though she was just another tavern wench." He remembered with a fond smile. "She made me laugh like no one had in a long while."

"She did something to Rumple." Belle mused. "Broke something. Made him afraid of love."

"Well he certainly did something to her." Hook snapped, tossing a stick into the fire with unnecessary vigor. Belle shrugged, still unnervingly calm.

"I'm not condemning or condoning anyone's actions. Just trying to understand."

"How could you be with a man like that? Weren't you afraid he would hurt you?" She shook her head.

"Never. He would have hurt himself a thousand times over before he let any harm come to me. I think he proved that to everyone, when he-" She stopped talking and shook her head.

"Aye, he acted honorably in the end. I'll give him that."

"Not just the end." She said quietly. "He was good and brave and kind so many times, but no one ever saw it. Sometimes that's hardest, to be the only person besides Bae who remembers any of his good traits, when none of us would even behere without him." There were tears, by the time she was done, and he didn't have the heart to correct her vision of Rumplestiltskin, to describe how gleeful he had been in the act of taking life and causing pain. And maybe they were both right. The man Killian Jones had once been, the man he was trying to be again for Emma's sake, had little to do with the sort of person who would cooperate with Cora, who would harm Belle for no greater crime than loving the wrong man. And sometimes, lately, he could even admit that his poor darling Milah should not have run off from her son without so much as a goodbye, even though she had done it for him. No one stayed in the light or dark forever, and it was the places where the two met which caused the most pain.

"I do regret using you to hurt him." He admitted, more than a little ashamed. Emma had taken him to task for that, and if Milah had been alive she would have as well. "That was wrong of me." She dried her eyes and said

"Thank you." He nodded, feeling uncomfortable. He was never this earnest for this long without slipping an innuendo in somewhere, and Belle was usually much more stoic when the others asked how she was holding up. But somehow the late night and the fireside had made an outpouring of truths inevitable. "I'm still rooting for Baelfire, you know." She said in a much lighter tone. He looked up sharply at that, and couldn't help returning her grin. "It's selfish, really. I want her in the family." And no one who had seen the way she and Rumplestiltskin looked at each other, how close she and Bae had drawn together in their grief, would have thought something as flimsy as a marriage mattered at all.

"Be that as it may, the fact remains that I want Miss Swan for much less wholesome reasons, and I am not easily dissuaded." Nevermind the fact that he dreamt of holding Emma while she slept more often than he dreamt of anything else. Belle snorted at his declaration and stood, saying that she was determined to get some rest before the sun rose. It was hard to believe that the Crocodile was finally dead, Killian thought as he watched Belle walk away from the light of the fire, but damn it if he hadn't been a lucky bastard while he lived.


End file.
